The FTC has decided to permit Intel's acquisition of McAfee. (Source: Flickr)

Company is now cleared to start its "hardware security" bid

Many
were baffled by Intel's August
announcement that it was acquiring McAfee, the leading maker
of antivirus software, for $7.68B USD. While Intel touted
the promise of "hardware security" options, many felt that
the deal was like trying to cross a cactus with an apple tree -- they
just didn't go together.

But for better or worse the deal has
been officially
approved by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the
government agency tasked with monitoring the market and making sure
mergers and acquisitions don't represent a threat to
competition.

While
the deal has earned the FTC's blessing, Intel is reportedly having a
much harder time convincing the European Commission -- the antitrust
arm of the European Union -- to approve it. The EC -- which
recently fined
Intel $1.45B USD for antitrust violations -- is reportedly
concerned that the deal would prevent McAfee's security rivals from
fairly competing with it.

They say that if Intel packages
security on-chip, it would be effectively guaranteeing that most
computers offered a built in advantage to McAfee. That would
hurt companies like Symantec in seeking to sell customers rival
antivirus suites.

The fear is perhaps justified, given Intel's
tactics in the past. Intel has been caught modifying its
compilers and other software to sabotage
the performance of rival hardware makers' products, such as
AMD CPUs or NVIDIA GPUs.Even
if the Intel/McAfee union gets the green light, significant
challenges remain. While Intel has some experience embedding a
typically software-driven technology on its CPUs, with its vPro
virtualization platform, embedding anti-malware functionality may
be tougher task.

On the one hand, putting security
scanning algorithms on-chip could greatly enhance their speed and
remove the burden they typically put on the CPU cores. However,
getting updated malware signatures to the core, with which to detect
suspicious files would be no easy task. In the first half of
2010, alone McAfee logged 10 million new malware variants.

Another
possibility is that Intel might monitor specific instruction
sequences to the CPU for signs of misbehavior. Again, this
would be very tricky to pull off, though.

In the short term,
whether the deal is approved or not McAfee will likely function
primarily independent of Intel. Intel has already promised to
run McAfee as an independent company, initially headed by Chief
Executive Officer Dave DeWalt.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini
promises big things from that collaboration, stating, "Only the
combination of hardware and software … can yield this kind of
innovation, and that's the reason for buying McAfee."

But
how or when those nebulous promises of "hardware security"
are actualized is even more uncertain than the acquisition's pending
approval with European regulators.